Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  SW You’ve worked in poetry and rock. What do you feel connects the Beats and rock music?

  PB I’d say it was much more evident in the US, with figures like Jim Morrison of the Doors, for example. You find a touch of it in Ray Davies [of the Kinks] and Pete Townshend [of the Who].

  The Beatles and Syd Barrett with Pink Floyd were very influential on rock lyrics. They turned the rock song into something English and that fascinated me for a time. ‘Strawberry Fields’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Arnold Layne’ were a huge breakthrough. They took it away from the transatlantic thing. You could write rock songs that were English. They were turning me on at that time. It was something I was trying to do, too. Spike Hawkins and me reading at the café in Liverpool, and Adrian [Henri] and Roger [McGough]. We brought an element of humour, a dark humour, from the blues and black American music. Lennon may well have been there, too. The Beatles and McGough also derived humour from the traditions of musical hall comedy.

  Q&A 3

  Jonah Raskin, Ginsberg biographer and cultural historian

  Jonah Raskin came of age in the wake of rock ’n’ roll and the writers of the Beat Generation. He entered Columbia College in New York in 1959, a decade after Allen Ginsberg graduated from the school, and took courses from some of the same professors, such as Lionel Trilling. In the mid-1960s he studied at the University of Manchester, then taught English and American literature at the State University of New York, and, since the 1980s, he has been a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University in California. The author of 14 books, including American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation (2004), he writes these days about movies, food, and popular culture for newspapers, magazines, and blogs and listens to the music of Ali Farka Toure, Lightnin’ Hopkins and to the rock ’n’ rollers of his youth: Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Ricky Nelson and more.

  What do you feel rock music has taken from Beat culture?

  Rock ’n’ roll took the wildest of the Beats – the sex, the drugs, the gang of guys thing. A rock band is a mini gang; the Beats were a boy gang. The road is there in a lot of rock lyrics and much of the mythology of the road comes from Kerouac. Ginsberg’s surrealism shaped Dylan’s poetry, and Burroughs injected that extreme consciousness you get in the Stones, the Doors, the Beatles, too.

  I was too young to be a Beat; but I was a beatnik when I was a teen and the Beats and rock ’n’ roll were all over my teen years. I loved Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins and Ginsberg and Kerouac; I’d listen to rock ’n’ roll and read On the Road – in 1957, 1958 – and read ‘Howl’, too. For me, the Beats and the rock ’n’ rollers are members of the same family. I also listened to jazz and the blues – as did the Beats.

  How can we best characterise the Beat/rock connection?

  The Beats were artists; rock musicians are artists too, so I would say that art is a main connection – making art and performing art. The performance thing is major; the Beats were superlative performers and the Beatles and Dylan learned about performing from the Beats.

  Where do you feel we encounter Beat influence in the rock music of the last half century or so?

  I see it in Lou Reed, the Clash, Patti Smith, in John Lennon/Paul McCartney lyrics. I see it in Jim Morrison, who was a poet, and a surrealist and a performer who was shocking audiences, much as Burroughs and Ginsberg shocked them. I guess Kerouac shocked – or maybe it was more like surprised – audiences, especially when he waxed spiritual.

  Do you think that the idea of the road that Kerouac and Cassady mythologised has been influential on musicians? Are there any examples you might share?

  Yes, absolutely. For one thing, bands are often on the road. They live on the road and play on the road and the whole road experience of the Beats was passed on to musicians – either directly or indirectly. The road as a place of adventure, discovery, mystery, is something the Beats and the rock ’n’ rollers share. Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour was a continuation of the Beats

  What do you feel the Beats’ take was on early rock ’n’ roll?

  They loved it and wanted to borrow from it. Kerouac wanted to change the title of his novel to Rock ’n’ roll Road. Ginsberg has a direct, obvious reference to rock ’n’ roll in ‘Howl’ – the phrase ‘rocking and rolling’.

  What do you think the Beats made of that post-Dylan/Beatles rock world?

  Well, Burroughs was, for a while, a fixture of the rock world of the 1990s. Punk belongs to the great American underground, counterculture phenomena – it’s a continuation from bohemian to hipster, to Beat to beatnik to hippy – to punk. That’s what it feels like to me. When punk came along, I felt connected instantly and felt too that this was part of an on-going vital thread – or chord, shall we say.

  What do you feel drew Dylan to Ginsberg – and Ginsberg to Dylan?

  Dylan was drawn to Ginsberg as a poet, as part of the dissident American culture that went back to Whitman. Lineage is important to Dylan and connecting to Ginsberg was rooting himself in an American idiom. I think it’s similar to his affinity for Woody Guthrie. Ginsberg loved stars and celebrities; he just naturally gravitated to them, and it was natural that he’d seek out Dylan.

  In what way do you think the work of the Beats benefitted from their association with rock music and musicians?

  In the second half of his life, Ginsberg played the harmonium when he read; he learned from rock and that music helped with poetry. Rock ’n’ roll also rescued Ginsberg from his despairing world view – the words, the energy, and the whole youthfulness of rock ’n’ roll made him more hopeful and accepting of himself and more optimistic about creating a humane world. Kerouac realised that a novel could be enriched with a soundtrack – with names of songs and musicians in the text so the reader would hear music while reading.

  Burroughs seemed to have little affinity with rock music yet he was adopted as a guru from the early 1970s? Why was that?

  Burroughs listened to rock. He liked the on-the-edge quality of the Stones, Mick Jagger – the darkness of the Stones and the sinisterness of the Stones. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. That sounds like Burroughs to me.

  Who would you identify as a the key rock musicians who have drawn on the Beat legacy?

  The Beatles, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Dylan, the Stones.

  Are there any particular tracks you feel personify this spirit?

  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has echoes of the Beats. I hear it in ‘A Day in the Life’. I hear it in Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’.

  A number of Beats – Ginsberg and Burroughs, Ferlinghetti and McClure among them – have made recordings with a rock flavour. What do you make of those experiments?

  Ginsberg and Burroughs were exciting performers – rock amplified the intensity of their work. I’ve read with Ferlinghetti when he was accompanied by Sarah Barker, who sings and plays the blues. I read with a stand up bass player from Canada named Claude Smith. I play with musicians as often as possible. I have heard McClure and Ray Manzarek and they’re a very hip duo.

  When rock has expressed itself politically in the last half century has it owed something to the original idealism or activism of the Beats?

  Well, I’d say Woodstock was the Beat world of the 1950s magnified a zillion times. The Gathering of the Tribes or the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967 had a Beat element to it, and was part of the cultural revolution of the day.

  Is there a sense that the Beat spirit survives in rock music of today?

  Musically speaking I’m a kind of dinosaur. I know the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and the Kinks really well. I know the names of their albums, say Abbey Road, and the years they came out. Yes, I do also listen to new bands with young musicians regularly because my favourite radio station is KALX – the student station from the University of California at Berkeley, 90.7. The DJs play great contemporary music. I love it and I write down the names of the albums and the groups, too, hoping to g
o to Amoeba Records, the last of the great record/CD stores in San Francisco, but then I never go and buy them. I just turn on the radio and hear the music they play. I don’t have any of the same familiarity I have with the rock groups of the 1960s and 1970s – and then also with groups like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. Driving around, listening to KALX, I imagine Cassady and Kerouac driving and listening to KALX, too, and snapping their fingers and maybe even singing as I sing, ‘Hail, hail rock ’n’ roll/Deliver me from the days of old’.

  6 THE SOUND OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE? THE BEATLES AND SGT. PEPPER, THE HIPPIES AND HAIGHT-ASHBURY

  There appears to be an inextricable link between the so-called Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles album that first appeared in June 1967, a recording that frames a sequence of songs which seemed to provide a ubiquitous soundtrack to the artistic and creative, social and political events that came together during that auspicious season. George Martin, the production mastermind behind the record, even called his 1995 account of the LP’s making Summer of Love.1 But how much did the group’s release actually owe to the spirit at large in that summer of 1967? Was Sgt. Pepper a catalyst, a mirror or merely a coincidental gathering of material which, it has been subsequently claimed, captured the flavour, distilled the mood, of those momentous months?

  There are further contradictions and confusions, too, we might contemplate in respect of the enduring association between that ground-breaking record and that memory-saturated time, if only because the seeds of that celebratory summer had been sown not in Liverpool, the Beatles’ birthplace, nor London, their de facto home by the time of the record’s release, but in a city some 7,000 miles away: San Francisco, the Californian centre of the hippy movement where multiple threads – musical, sartorial, narcotic, erotic and spiritual – had been woven into a psychedelic tapestry by members of an unconventional community located where the city streets of Haight and Ashbury intersected. In that Bay Area neighbourhood, a community that appeared to succeed, even supersede, the Beat settlements in North Beach in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had been established. Yet the connections between the bohemian poets of that earlier generation and the new wave of young artists and music-makers could hardly be avoided. While the hippies wore their hair longer and displayed a multitude of colour, when set against the more austere, often black, garb of the Beats, there was a powerful sense that the tribes setting up home in the Haight were the new, confident and more flamboyant heirs to that previous community of writers, artists and activists. If the styles had changed, the world had certainly changed also: the sound of the Cold War’s low throb had been displaced by a higher profile and more vociferous chorus, one generated by masses gathering and demonstrators expressing a new and urgent mood. The early 1960s had seen righteous ethnic agitation as black Americans and their allies sought recognition and equality; by the mid-decade the playing field had shifted as the administration’s call to arms, with military involvement in Vietnam intensifying by the month, posing the very real possibility of the draft for tens of thousands young adult male Americans, The theoretical, somewhat abstract threat, of nuclear annihilation had been overtaken, initially by largely non-violent calls for Civil Rights and then by an ever-more vigorous resistance to the strategies of the American war machine, brazenly uncurling its talons in the paddy fields of South East Asia. The young hippy nation, well exemplified by its principal Californian enclave and the anti-war Summer of Love it would call in 1967, would be important factors in the unfolding of a high-octane drama in the last few years of the decade. As Farrell describes this rising quarter of San Francisco around this very time:

  The vortex of the Summer of Love was Haight-Ashbury, a San Franciscan neighbourhood bordering on Golden Gate Park. Because of its low rents, the Haight had become an attraction for many young people […] they developed a distinctive American subculture in the district, and they advertised it to America.2

  In fact, the signs that Haight-Ashbury would become the focus of a new consciousness had begun to reveal themselves as early as 1965,3 so there are certain curiosities that it took a further two years or so before there was a global recognition that the innovative ingredients, being mixed by a fresh-minded, post-war and baby boomer generation, had a broad sense of purpose, a philosophical foundation and an identifiable manifesto. Furthermore, why was it in the UK that these characteristics were apparently made flesh, or at least vinyl, and linked so wholeheartedly to the Beatles’ eighth LP?

  The short answer may well be that, by the middle years of the increasingly sensational Sixties, where the Beatles led, the world’s mass media, not to mention the planet’s hundreds of millions of popular music fans, followed. If the Fab Four chose to pin their colours to a particular mast, a flotilla of journalists, photographers, film-makers and screaming adherents would be speedily in pursuit of the Merseysiders’ flagship.4 To use contemporary language, they were simply the most potent global brand of the time, irresistible, it seems, to both trend-seekers and opinion-formers. By adopting styles and embracing attitudes that had, until then, been seen as radical and revolutionary, distasteful and even dangerous, the band’s ability to mediate between the extremes of insurrectionary contumacy and died-in-the-wool conservatism was extraordinary. Both heads of state5 and the heads, the freaks, of the Californian communes seemed hypnotised by their charisma.

  So, when the 39 minutes of music on Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles’ most ambitious studio outing so far, appeared to draw upon various en vogue aspects of the cultural moment and re-stage them in words and sound, the project was bound to attract global media coverage, the interest of television, newspapers and magazines. In isolation, the colourful and eccentric hordes of Haight-Ashbury, with their non-conformist codes and countercultural associations, could only dream of attention on such a scale. The Beatles had an ability to cross boundaries, test convention, yet still appeal to the mainstream reporter or broadcaster and, by implication, their middle-of-the-road, mass audiences. This remarkable pop group were capable, it seemed, of transcending divisions of age, race and class, bridging the generation gap through their blend of musical originality and personable humour in a way that the Rolling Stones, determinedly uncouth, or Bob Dylan, relentlessly surly, could not.

  But there is another factor to consider. If the Beatles had apparently alchemically frozen the spirit of the Zeitgeist, they had also achieved this sleight of hand at a distance. Even if England and, more specifically, London had been dubbed ‘swinging’ by the American press as early as 19666 and Carnaby Street had been crowned the epicentre of happening fashion,7 the heart and soul of the new thinking still rested in the US. It was certainly on that side of the Atlantic, that the social movements and left-field subcultures, which had lit the blue touch-paper of an alternative lifestyle, continued to burn most brightly.

  As we have hinted, at the seat of these developments were the earlier acts of often middle-class, frequently college-educated outsiders – literary figures like J. D. Salinger, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer and the Beat Generation writers8 – who, in the Fifties, identified a sickness in the US heartland, anxiously recoiling at the nuclear threat, vengefully revelling in the McCarthy-ite witch-hunts. These writers and commentators penned poems, essays, plays and novels which caught the imagination of thousands of younger readers who despised and challenged the reactionary and straitjacketed mind-set of middle America. Folk singers, too, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who had championed socialist ideals from as early as the 1930s, had provoked the ire of the authorities once the Cold War had taken hold.9 Yet the judicial procedures that took on the forces of the left in the decade after the Second World War could not douse the flames of change that these astute writers and acoustic troubadours had effectively fanned.

  Such artistic gestures encouraged later political strategies, too. The Civil Rights campaign for Negro equality had a history of more than a decade10 by the time Sgt. Pepper hit the racks of the record stores. More pertin
ently perhaps, the Vietnam War had reached a furious juncture by 1967 and the twin spectres of the military draft and the daily evidence of physical devastation in the war-zone – detailed reportage from the battle-front appearing on family TV screens each evening – concentrated minds more effectively than any brand of rock ’n’ roll, however re-shaped and re-marketed, could possibly have achieved. The protests that gained momentum in US cities – whether in black ghettoes or on white campuses – may have occurred to a backdrop of, often thrilling, musical accompaniment – gospel, folk, blues, electric rock – but the true triggers were the visceral, stomach-churning realities of, on the one hand, social repression of a minority caste at home and, on the other, a government-sponsored conflict against political forces abroad.

  Which of itself, raises a further paradox: why should winters of discontent, springs of desperation, autumns of exasperation, that had preceded 1967, certainly in the USA, suddenly sire a Summer of Love? How could the brutalising, sometimes killing, of non-violent protestors in the American South, the murders of charismatic figureheads such as President John F. Kennedy and Black Muslim leader Malcolm X and the increasing tensions between pro- and anti-war forces across that nation, spawn a time when love – a spiritually-founded, emotionally-centred and increasingly anachronistic concept in an era of spreading mechanisation and accelerating secularity – was presented as the only weapon of response, of reform, of last resort, remaining?

  This chapter will aim to identify the elements that we may regard as the central components and key signifiers of the Summer of Love and, further, examine how far these ideas may have been contained in or expressed by the Beatles’ signature 1967 album. To what extent did the Summer of Love exist as a conscious construct and how far was it merely a convenient shorthand by the anti-authoritarian lobby to seek and achieve media approval or approbation? To what degree did the Beatles determinedly aim to condense the ideas and ideals of that moment into a long-playing record and how much was Sgt. Pepper merely a serendipitous reflection of the activities and actions of the time?